Graymotion's Production Zone

I read on a few other threads that it may be acceptable to post a single thread to house both questions I have and examples of VFX techniques that I'm working to master. I don't want to post threads all over the forum and clutter the place up so I decided on this. Please inform me if this is not ""cool".

First up - I wonder if I'm going about this all wrong? A project I'm working on has, well, a ton of grade layers. Although the layer seems to work well for isolating lights between layers as suggested by @Triem23 I wonder if it's too much and the wrong technique?

One question - I used a shot of waves slapping the shore, rotated it 180 degrees an drew a mask around it. The partical simulator used for the clouds (atmosphere) seems to effect the lighting of the water and the mountains. Is this what I should expect?

Comments

Nah, starting a "Master" thread for questions and showing off your projects isn't somethin' the "cool kids" will look down on. It makes you a "cool kid." Joking aside, it does keep the forum cleaner, and, if a question pops up in six months related to something else in this thread you can always say something like "On page two of this thread we talked about..." rather than linking to something else.

Speaking of questions. It's not always uncommon to have lots of layers or lots of grade layers. As to if it's "Wrong," well--the thing about photo/video software is that there's usually four or five different ways to do something. "right vs wrong" isn't always something with a hard answer. It depends on what you're using all the grade layers for. A lot of the grades in your layer stack are labelled "New Grade Layer," so we can't tell what they're doing. So the thing I can say you're doing "Wrong" is not labeling your layers correctly. For example, if I'm using a grade layer only to separate 3d spaces for lighting, I'll name the Grade Layer "Separator Grade" or something like that. If I'm using a Grade Layer to flatten the layers below for use as a light wrap, I'll name it "Background Flatten," and so forth.

Now, for isolating lights from each other you have a few ways to go about that. Grade layer separation, embedding Composite Shots, and... Lighting in isolation. Grade we've talked about, and I already see you have embedded comps, so we don't need to talk about that--so... lighting. Let's use that back left planet as an example: You could light that with a spotlight that aimed in such a way to not hit anything else, which removes the need to separate with grades or comps.

For organizing layers, honestly, 31 layers isn't too bad at all, and it doesn't look like you have too much "fluff" going on. Looks like you could combine things into embedded comps if you wanted--Layers 18 to 31 for example look like that's pretty much your starfield, background planets and horizon, so those could be an embedded comp--maybe with your mountains as well. Which could be helpful as you refine the shot since you could proxy out all those layers for quick playback if you were going to make a lot of adjustments to your HUD and comet particles. But I think I discussed this with you in another thread--that I tend to build most of my stuff in a single comp shot, then, when I get into detail refining I try to group elements that are "locked," and turn them into embedded comps with proxies.

OK, the particles affecting BG lighting. You have everything set up so that the particles aren't lit by anything. (Hey, that grade layer below the particles? If that's there to separate particles from lights, you can lose that grade and set the material/layer properties for the particles by turning off the "Illuminated" property. Then the particles will ignore all lights anyway). The particles shouldn't be lit or casting shadows. However, the particle texture itself might have lighter and darker areas. If the particles are in a "Normal" blend mode then light areas make things lighter, dark areas will make things darker. In "Add" blend mode it will just brighten things. It looks to me like you're using a Normal blend, and that the particles aren't doing anything to the lighting, but it kind of looks like it is because of the way your moving, semi-transparent particles are moving. So, yeah, it's to be expected.

Finally--this shot's looking rather nice! The only issue I see is that the comet tail particles pop in a bit abruptly. Have you looked at the "Lifetime" panel for the particle sim yet? That's got a lot of deep level control that lets you change particle properties over their lifespan. So you could use the lifetime panel to give the comet particles a bit of a fade-it, and even use the LIfetime panel to have the particles start very small and "grow" to "normal" size (combined with a fade in?) and even grow a bit more as they hang. I see the fade-out, so you may already be using Lifetime?

Alright! You actually made something stick that you mentioned before. The stack flow works the same to some extent from what I'm accustomed to. In Motion 5 you build in groups which is layers in HF. Accordingly you can isolate lights in Motion by putting them in the group. On large builds the layers panes is massive. I have one project in motion with 185 elements in 15 groups. The lighting and grading is tedious. When you have several of the groups open it's truly confusing to keep track of what your looking at.

As a result of my stuborness not to read and learn, rather stumble and bumble, I approached HF in the same way. I was just building along in a single composite so I could see it all- apparently as you do as well. The difference though is the composite shot. You mentioned composite shots before but I had NO idea that I could select several layers (as you mentioned) turn them into a composite shot AND the composite is then added to the main composite I was working in! Went from that 31 layers to a more manageable 13. All I can say is.. cool!

In Motion I would have had to render out the individual elements and then bring them back into the project otherwise particle simulators, emitters and working render settings bogs down real-time play back. The composite panel in HF really makes the process much more simple, in my mind, to create and tweak (as you said) individual scenes and then bring them all into final.

I'm going to hijack your naming scheme. Looks like a sound way to approach it. I was having brain farts when doing the build and then after you pointed out that you had no idea what the grade layers were doing-- neither did I. I've since corrected my ways.

Onto the particle simulator. I did have movment BUT I couldn't figure out why the clouds over powered the whole scene..thus I had the layer blend mode at Normal and the opacity at 3%. Kinda useless to have the particles with opacity so low but I thought "what the hay". The "Illuminated" property and blend you mentioned was the key. Much better now. Apprently I have much to learn about the effects in HF before I can call myself a "rookie".

You've laid out a plethora of quality advice and tips in our few exchanges that I will definitely take heed in and follow by example.

I went ahead and tried to complete the exercise as a learning lesson for my self. Although I couldn't completely get the aliasing to go away I think I controlled it for the most part with lighting and model texture grading outlined in the referenced thread above.

I also tried my hand at adding some volumetric lighting and a bit of Ion engine glow using light flares. Not the best work but was a good learning experience for me.

Continuing with the learning I followed the two tutorials 1) panoramic photos as environment maps and 2) particles and displacement effects to create a jet exhaust.

I added motion blur to the 3D model to get the rotors blades to look more realistic in flight but as a result a blur was applied to the entire model. Expected but a bummer. The model is unrolled instead of a 3D plane so I couldn't apply a light wrap to soften the edges. The blur does soften but a bit too much.

I created a flattened layer from the particle simulator and fiddled with the Lifetime /Alpha gradient channel as show in the tutorial but my heat displacement for the copter engines looks more smokey than heat warped.

The first shot of "Behind the Moon" shows great improvement from the first version in the other thread. You certainly fixed that "skew." Have you looked at keyframe interpolation modes? By right-clicking a keyframe, you get your choices of several modes: Linear, Constant, Smooth, Smooth In and Smooth Out. Linear is the default, and it looks like that's what most of your keys are. For things like the Star Destroyer zooming away, Smooth In might work better, etc. (Constant, btw means the key value doesn't change at all until the next key when the value "snaps" to it's new setting. Useful when you need it. :-)

The helicopter shot is looking nice, but here's a few more tips.

First you noted that your heli was "3D Unrolled" and not a "3D Plane." 3D Plane mode isn't terribly useful for models. In general, here's why models should be composited in 2D or 3D Unrolled. 2D Models are rendered correctly with the relative position and angle towards the camera, directly to the layer. At this point you can add effects directly to the layer (And 2D models don't "seperate" 3D spaces like we discussed in your earlier thread--just video/photo/grade layers.). 3D Unrolled layers render all objects in position/rotation relative to the camera, but doesn't "collapse" the render into a layer until you insert a Grade. This is why you can't add effects to 3D Unrolled layers--because you can't add effects until something is rendered, and in 3D unrolled mode, Hitfilm isn't rendering the models until it hits a grade or the top of the layer stack. 3D Plane mode is strange... It renders like a 2D layer, but the plane itself forms a "clipping window." What this means is if you have the model and plane oriented to the camera incorrectly, the edge of the plane will intersect the model--and Hitfilm won't draw anything outside the plane.

Now, since this shot is basically a model a heat haze and an environment map and you're bringing in the heat haze as a 2D layer, go ahead and make your heli 2D as well. Then you can add Light Wrap and other effects.

Take the motion blur off the grade. Select the heli layer. On the top of the timeline pane you should see a "motion blur" cog. Select that and it should turn blue. Now your Heli will get blur on the rotors without effecting everything else.

The Environment Map layer is a little "fisheye" compared to your heli. This is common with environment maps. The fix is easy: Scale up the Env Map layer until the perspectives are closer matches. Then create a 3D point (For now, named "Env Map Pivot") and add the Environment Map Transform effect to the Environment Map layer. Now you can rotate the Env Map to position the flare behind the heli again, since changing the sale will move the sun out of frame.

Finally, super-detail hound hint. If your Google-fu is semi-skilled, you should be able to find the main and tail rotor RPM's for the heli type you're showing. This would let you get the rotation speeds of the rotors dead-perfect-accurate. Probably no one would notice the difference, but it's a nice thing to do. :-)

I'm not certain what's going on with the haze--it's pretty subtle and took me a couple of views to spot it. It's a pretty small area of the animation, and my only guess is that a "realistic" level of distortion isn't showing up. From that far away you wouldn't see that much distortion to begin with, and you might have just cranked the settings up too high just looking for ANY effect. Try backing off the intensity by 50% and see what that looks like.

Here's an idea: Basically we're adapting this tutorial with a few extra steps. www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7RG4TTjhP0

First,if you have Photoshop/Gimp other photo/paint program, go back into your environment map image, remove the sun/Flare with your favorite cloning tools and save it out. If you don't have a paint program, load your map image into a comp shot the same dimensions as the image and use Hitfilm's Clone Stamp effect or masked duplicates of this layer to paint out the sun.

Second, in a canvas the same size as your map image paint in a (soft-ish) pure white circle where the sun is on a black background and save this out (This is "Light Map.")

Fourth, in Hitfilm, Duplicate your animation shot. You don't need the particles/heat haze layer. Replace the environment map with the Light Map you made. Use Curves or Threshold or Level Histogram to make your helicopter totally black. Basically you want a black background, a white circle and a black "cutout" of the heli over the circle.

Fifth, bring this composite shot into your animation comp. Put it above the bg/heli/heat haze layers and set it's blend mode to ADD. Now add Auto Flares to this layer and adjust to taste. By creating the circle where the sun was in the original pic at the same size and using the same enviroment map settings you've placed the bright spot in the right place for the original sun. By having the heli "cut out" the circle the Auto Flares will more-or-less correctly be occluded by the heli and the flare artifacts will appear in front of the heli as they should.

You can kind of see it in this shot of mine, although I didn't paint out the original sun first--which I should have--, but it looks pretty solid when the copter rotors pass over the added sun.

First - roger on the keyframe interpolations. The Behind the Moon was all about trying to get the skew to go away which I almost accomplished. As I was working the project ideas just kept popping into my head...landing bay and then ship departure. I rushed myself with the final scene. I wanted to attempt a light jump to finish it off. A project for another day to be sure.

I took all of you advice about the helicopter shot and tried each one - some with success and other not so much. The clipping issue you pointed out 3D vs 3D unrolled - I noticed that while I was working. Motion 5 has the same issue. Very annoying.

I've noted and drilled into my head that at times I have to make a composite shot of 3D models first before applying some effects. Check-verified.

Super useful tip with the environment map. The shot did indeed have a fish-eye look. I got the fish-eye handled. I also tried to employ the matte technique you mentioned by using a new environment map to get the correct occlusion effect but had problems there. I used Pixelmator to A) remove original sun and paint a white-circle on black canvas same size and save it out as a light map. All well there.

When I duplicated the animation and change the environment map to the light map I get reflections of the white circle on the light map when it''s in the Environment Map Viewer - (which you mentioned Environment Map Transform fixed to a point). My attempt seems to skew the suns diameter and does not follow the exit path of the sun's position in the original environment map. So..I'll work on the technique based of your advice and the matte tutorials I see here and there till I get it fleshed out.

Super detail hound - Yep...rotors were spinning at Mach 1. I found the specs for the rotor displacement for the Blackhawk U-60 and took the RPM's and came up with the proper rotation for a 9 sec clip. I looked at about 20 Blackhawks in flight and it looks like I got close. Note: - I did as you suggested with the motion blur and I tried a million ways to one to get the same motion blur affect on the rotors as you did in your shot but I could get no where near that effect. Something else I'll work on.

Note - I cheated with the sun - 2 light flares - one above -one below the 3D model. Also I borrowed Axel's tree from his newest tutorial on 2D images into 3D scenes. Also- the I changed the sound to that of an actual UH60 in flight.

You might consider blurring the twig in the foreground since your point of focus is farther away. In fact you might flip the twig horizontally due to your light coming from the right. The current twig looks to be lit from slightly left and from behind the camera. Nit picky, I know, but it's the little things that can sometimes sell the shot.

I notice the lighting on the branches straight way but I did nothing to fix it. Shame on me...rushed the finish. Actually an after thought - gone bad. I tried a depth of field with the camera itself but because of my precarious camera /model move the entire shot was blown. I did add the lens blur effect as you suggest but not near enough it appears.

I''m pretty new to Hitfilm Pro and I have much to learn but I keep at it with comments from folks in the community and the tutorials available.

I can't think of tutorials on motion for lens flares. I mean, ultimately it's like animating any element. Practice makes perfect, but remember reference... Look at movies/TV shows with a look similar to what you want. You can even get a YouTube downloader, save clips and frame by frame study in Hitfilm. I do that myself.

Kinda the same with camera shake. If you're going for a handheld look you want something slower, for a shockwave when something passes the camera, a quick burst that slows down. That's keyframe animation of the shake effect.

If you feel adventurous, create another point, parent your camera to it and manipulate this "Shake" point to "roll your own" shake. Takes a bit longer, but can generate better results. Again, reference clips.

10-4 on referencing clips and thanks for the tip on camera shake @Triem23. I tired my hand at animating a camera fixed to a point to get a "bumpy fluid" look of flight. That technique will take practice to be sure. My "fluid" flight appears a bit too rigid. Question here: Could I use mocha and track ground objects in an aerial flight and then use that data for camera shake (movement)??

@Stargazer54 - I like the Cine Style effect but at times it seems a bit too blue. I know curves helps that. None the less I used it here to help blend the model. I worked to get the sharpness out of the model in this attempt. It's better but.. is missing something.

Perhaps the new lighting and texture controls in HF Pro 4 would bring better results??

Edit- I built the HUD in Motion mainly because I have not figured out if Hitfilm can draw shapes.

Yeah, you can motion track a shaky shot and use that data. I should have mentioned it earlier. For the camera move in the drone shot I think you might be better to 2D point track a handheld shot the parent your camera move to that track. Easier than mocha. Smart of you to spot the possibility!

Hitfilm's new shader model will improve your color and shading (you'll get BG spill) , but for sharpness, well, this shot doesn't look like it needs to be Unrolled. Make the drone 2D and add Light Wrap. Set the layer to the BG plate and the blend to Lighten (in the Wrap), then add a 1px blur at 1 iteration. That should really make the model blend nicely.

Every shot is getting better. You're starting to find your comfort zone in the software.

I did what you've taught me and turned the model, lights, point, etc into a single comp (2D) , "wrapped" it with the BG plate and fiddled with the opacity of the wrap BUT the thing I overlooked was the Blur.

I have in the plans to do a few more types of these shots to learn to refine models, get a better grip on the particle generator. I'll will be adding some tracking data to the scene during the process. Thanks for the advice on how's to go about it.

I used 2 missile smoke presets for the main engine and 2 partial simulators for the wing tip streams. I played with alpha, scale and speed in the lifetime panel to get a wider dispersant of the smoke at the end of the wing stream tails. Kinda of got it but could be better.

Yup, looks good. You could fiddle with particles settings for hours to get a minor improvement, or say "lesson learned" and move to the next experiment.

Don't hang up on little details in these early learning stages. Broad strokes, learn the concepts, develop your workflow, then in a couple of months you'll throw everything into one massive shot encompassing everything! THEN you can worry about perfection.

In Emitter>Particle System>Appearance>Type you have your options for None, Built In and Layer. A Layer can be a plane, picture, video clip, embedded composite shot or 3D model.

When a Layer is the texture source you have the choices of Single, Random and Animated. This refers to frames.

Single uses the same image for all the textures.

Random takes random still frames from the source layer for each particle. Say you're doing subtle falling leaves... Making an embedded comp shot with, say, 6 pictures of leaves gives me six possible particle shapes in a single system.

Animated is what you want. That lets you set a start frame from the animated source layer, set the number of frames to use, and if to loop the animation.

These controls apply to 3D models as sources also. Yes, an animated 3D Model can be a particle texture.

So... If you're thinking of making a video clip of a smoke puff into your contrail texture, a couple of hints. First, stabilize the shot so the smoke stays centered. Second, shrink your texture down as far as you can, then proxy it. Large particle textures slow Hitfilm down a lot, so a 720x720 texture for a contrail becomes wasted detail and render time. 128x128 might even be overkill, but it's a good starting size.

I've been refining my skills a bit when it comes to occlusion. I played with the light rays effect as well the set matte to create this short un-explainable explosion. I used 3 textures for the rocks and hijacked @Triem23 's 3D stars work

I'm not sure I got the whole occlusion thing down yet as the asteroids in the middle part appear blacker than the rest at the beginning. The 3 copies of the explosion (one for set matte source) seem to work well but not sure I occluded the asteroids properly with the 2 layers, one of which is a set matte for the explosion.

TL/DR: darker in direct line from light to camera is expected behavior.

Long Form: Light Rays is a cheat effect of an effect that's cheating. Space=near vaccum. Probably not enough particulate matter around to generate haze. But model-makers used haze on practical shots because perception is hardwired to assume haze=depth. And, it looks cool. Dust and haze bounces the color of the light source around, but objects cause shadows, and it's the SHADOWS that define the shape of the rays. So the "darker" asteroids... Well, the camera is in their direct shadow. No intervening haze scatters any light.

Now, here's what Light Rays is actually doing. It's taking the source layer as a brightness map, then performing a linear blur using the 2D position of the hotspot as the center. All the other controls basically adjust feathering, brightness, color and so on it cool ways.

At heart, cool effects are packages of layered, basic effects, optimized and adjusted for a specific range of results. Try, padawan, to look into an effect to see it's building blocks. Strong, in FX you will be.

Ok, explosion. It's in front of all asteroids to my eyes. Where is it supposed to be? What is that explosion matte used for and how?

Put a point light in your asteroid comp and synch it with the explosion so the explosion illuminates the asteroids. Don't forget to adjust Falloff on the light to limit it.

Hmmmm. Just the Photons is one of mine. Let me look at it. GL Invalid would make one think it's an OpenGl issue. I built that in Hitfilm 2 Ultimate, maybe something changed in 4? I dunno. Have you tried your own version? It's a series of points parented around a spinning center point, with instances of Lightning linking the center to the outer points, a small fractal noise plane with spherize on it for a core, and a lens flare. It's really designed to be proxied and used as a particle texture, or an embedded instance. But.... Try building something similar using 2-point Lightsab--swords instead of Lightning and it would look a lot better!

"At heart, cool effects are packages of layered, basic effects, optimized and adjusted for a specific range of results. Try, padawan, to look into an effect to see it's building blocks. Strong, in FX you will be. "

Thank you for the teachings Master. Try, I will, to someday be a great creator such as yourself. Your advice is deeply sinking into the head and not going to waste with this (old) Padawan.

Incidentally, here's a mini tutorial that I did regarding a contest entry--I was working in Caustics, but both Caustics and Parallax use a grayscale image to generate a height map... Caustics just adds controls to simulate reflection and refraction based on an environment map layer (reflection) and a "bottom surface" layer (refraction).

For your purposes just note how the grayscale values in my map composite translates into height in the final effect. The point here being, if you set up an embedded composite shot with two text objects--the bottom one having a light grey fill/no outline, and the top layer being a transparent fill with a white outline, then copying that embed into your main comp, you can then use 3D extrusion on that text to add some depth, then add parallax to add a bevel! Of course you'd use some color effects before the extrusion to kill the grey/white--or use another copy of the same text as a clean source?

Boris is also a good option, but, at the moment, Boris uses it's internal camera and lights, so it's a bit harder to integrate with a Hitfilm scene if you have other 3D things going on. FxHome indicates a future update will link Boris to Hitfilm's camera and lights, at which point those Boris Fx are going to become very super-duper useful, indeed.

Ah! Thanks for all the tips folks. I hadn't payed much attention to the Boris upgrade to HF. Something I'll defiantly dig into though after the first as well as extrude and parallax.

I went ahead with the Motion 5 production for this year but threw in fireworks made in Hitfilm placed over a shot of the moon I took with my Panasonic G7 a few days back. I also mixed a bunch of fireworks videos into textures for varying effect. I replaced the link in the post that started my line of questioning for reference.

After a few hectic weeks of burning fiber to meet deadlines I've had a chance to get back into a little creativity and tried my hand at jet thrusters. My little test is based on an AE tutorial I found and adapted those steps into Hitfilm 4.

I couldn't, as of yet, figure out how to do it with the partial simulator so I went with a flattened looked using circle shapes, blur, glow and shake. If there is a way to use the PS I'd be interested in refining this.